Curation starts

Here’s what I am going to do, picking up Ben’s role as interface.

  1. complete the curators ranks. I have written to @Caroline_Paulick-Thiel to pick up the physical assets one, and to @Matthias for the digital/cultural assets one.
  2. Send them a "Let the curation start" email with the instructions.
  3. The email will propose one curators hangout between here and LOTE4. If that's too difficult, it will be left to pairs of curators to organize.  Among other things, that hangout needs to organize the opening panel as per the stub program.
  4. @Natalia to be curators liaison for Edgeryders in Matera – the MT2019 will have their own.

What’s a curator got to do?

Sorry for the blunt question but I’m not well versed in these conference things :smiley: I assume a curator would prepare and moderate the opening and closing panel discussions, and select sessions that will be part of the curated track? Non-selected sessions would then be welcome to join the unconference afterwards?

Not sure if that job is for me, since I’m much more into creating resources at the tech level than developing the means to govern and maintain them …which leads me to a peculiar apolitical approach to stewardship that might not be helpful when organizing a conference about stewardship (namely, “globalize information, localize everything else”).

So … if there’s somebody else who loves this job, it will be a better match :slight_smile: Did we include Lauren among the curators for example? She has seen a big lot of stewardship approaches during the cases studies … . Anyway, if there’s still a gap to fill and you folks are ok with my style of filling it, I wouldn’t reject the curator role.

What curation means

  1. Curators are pairs, 2 per track. You would represent the community's point of view, but do the curation in a team of two people. The other person in your team is Amelia Andersdotter. 
  2. Tracks consists of sessions. Sessions are proposed bottom-up by the community and end up in the provisional program. Curators are supposed to review the tracks; get in touch with the proponents (ideally through the platform – just leave a comment on the session page) to help them frame the session in a way consistent with the big picture (example: "In talking about this, could you highlight how you were able to take over the stewardship of this good? Was it a formal process? Did you just walk in and do it? What problems did you have with the legitimacy of that?"). Additionally, curators can tell us (me) if they feel something is missing, and we will look from expertise in the community to make the missing session happen. There are so far only five sessions having been proposed in the digital track: https://edgeryders.eu/en/topics/lote4-digital. As you see it's not really about selection, more about helping and enabling. There could be the need to encourage more than one session to merge, but I would say everything that has been proposed makes it to the program... unless 20 more proposals come in!
  3. Curators are expected to give an opening and a closing panel.

You, my friend, struggle everyday to keep valuable digital resources from crumbling under the blows of entropy. I am learning a lot about organizing information from you, and why you should not compromise on certain architectural choices. I think you are a sterling steward, and your point of view would be enormously valuable. Your call.

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